The ideal of universal stewardship and proprietorship is at once more intellectually and morally demanding.

The False Promise of Progress

by Mark Malvasi

Americans have long celebrated progress, assuming that the uninterrupted expansion of productivity would bring continuous improvement to their standard of living. At the same time, they yearn for the simplicity of the past...


“America is hard to see,” wrote Robert Frost, not least because there is a duality to the American mind. Americans have long exalted freedom, often depicting themselves as its unique beneficiaries. At the same time, they have more than once altered the meaning of freedom and have just as often disagreed among themselves about its character, scope, and purpose. Similarly, Americans have long celebrated progress, assuming that the uninterrupted expansion of productivity would bring continuous improvement to their standard of living. At the same time, they yearn for the simplicity of the past. In their bewilderment, Americans have now all but lost the ability to formulate what they most need: an imaginative reconstruction of their history and a sober assessment of their prospects. The idea of freedom and the ideal of progress have combined to reassure Americans that, unlike other peoples, they are, and forever will be, the masters of their fate. Such a pleasing illusion has exhausted its usefulness and become an impediment to thought and action.

Not every American had benefitted equally from the so-called market revolution, that series of widespread social and economic changes that swept the United States in the early nineteenth century, specifically the replacement of a subsistence and artisan economy by commercial agriculture and capitalist manufacturing. Small farmers and urban workers had every reason to believe that the rise and spread of commerce and capitalism would bring them not boundless opportunities but unending dependence. By the late 1820s and early 1830s, these anxieties fed into a many-sided crisis of political faith. To the frustration of those Americans who aspired to become self-made men, and thereby to achieve the American Dream, the new institutions of nineteenth-century capitalism, such as chartered corporations and commercial banks, presaged the rise and consolidation of an aristocracy of money to which ordinary men would be subservient.

Antidotes for the disease included more democracy; reformers in some states fought to lower or abolish property requirements for voting and holding office. In addition, urban workers lobbied to form unions, understanding early that their strength lay in numbers. Southerners demanded lower tariffs and greater respect for state rights. Westerners clamored for cheaper land and debt relief. Much of this diverse ferment eventually coalesced behind Andrew Jackson, who pledged to speak for those who had lost out in the competitive struggle. Given his frontier antecedents, it is no surprise that Jackson epitomized the growing contempt for economic and political elitism, with its demands for hierarchical deference and its wariness of popular democracy.


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